Just this week in the news, a CDC (American Government) study has revealed that nearly 10% of children have ADHD, and about 2/3rds of them are being medicated for theis disorder.
In my own harrowing experience raising a very active child while single with no insurance coverage for anything psychological I found that there is, without a doubt, a heavy bias toward helping children who are higher in socioeconomic cl
ass. My daughter could talk at 9 mos., carry on a rather sophisticated conversation by age 2 and was reading by the time she was 3. She was deemed "a distraction" in class, and put off to the side of the classroom for the first 5 years of school. Urged to take her to a doctor to be evaluated for ADHD. Twice a pediatrician who claimed to be an ADHD specialist...didn't believe ADHD was the problem. She had a very high tactile sensitivity and problems with seams in socks, etc. We went to a community counseling program, and the counselor didn't believe that ADHD was the issue either. Her first grade teacher meekly suggested at an IEP meeting that she may be "gifted", but the "team" agreed not to test for that until the behaviors were under control. Stupid. She was a pest in class, primarily because she was bored out of her mind, and she actually said so nearly every day. Teachers refused to look at anything more than the "behavior"problem because it was a hindrance to the classroom. When she was in 4th grade I had a job for a short while that offered insurance for a psychologist, she was given a TOVA and found to be well above average in her ability to focus. She started to flounder in 4th grade, but at home on the internet, she was thrilled learning geometry through interacive games. By that time she absolutely hated school. I was exactly the same way and I barely got through high school. She got through and she's 18 now and taking classes at community college, but she just doesn't fare well in a traditional learning environment with one way learning. Teacher teaches, student absorbs. Ho hum.
I've been tech savvy for 12 or so years now, and I find Penn State's World Campus format to be a bit antiquated compared to what's available, and wonder why such a massive "learning institution" such as Penn State isn't on the edge of these advancements.
I think a lot of these kids are being misdiagnosed as ADHD... and I think the drugs do help the matters they are faced with, i.e., failure to conform to our expectations for their performance in some way, either academically, or behaviorally, or some combination of the two. I just can't buy into it all without some reservations.. The phenomenon we call ADHD is real, but I see it as primarily an American socio-cultural phenomenon. That's a pretty "macro" perspective, but I can't help but making some observations...
Kids are now exposed to so much so early on, and their minds are really busy because of it. Is a child with ADHD in some way defective? I don't think so at all. It seems to me they might be a byproduct of a dichotomy in our culture.. Consider a 20 year old today.... they evolved in a culture where their own parents were bored with "57 channels and nothing on" (to quote a Bruce Springsteen song)... Think "leap frog", teddy ruxpin, Amazing Amanda, interactive talking childrens books, video games, Disney movies and animation galore...By the time they're 5, they've all spent many hours of their lives physically strapped down and riding in cars with gadgets and games and videos and/or music. They get to these monstrous markets, and they're bombarded with stimuli.... riding in the shopping cart with mom, observing mom who is evaluating 200 kinds of toothpaste.
Kids come into this world I've described, and quickly develop minds that are less and less capable of learning in the system the way it is traditionally equipped to teach them. I suspect some places in the world have far surpassed the United States in terms of education and technology. That's the word on the street anyway. American traditions are not evolving and keeping up with the onslaught of modernitity and culture. Much of it is reserved for "kids today". It's really a widening gap that's accelerating. For the last 10 years, kids are constantly instant messaging, surfing the internet, watching videos, they have 3 million choices in "indie" music you've never heard of, and accessing a hundred-thousand times more media than the previous generation ever dreamed of. After their excessive exposure to a saturated culture, their put in sheep herd like conditions in the schools. Add to that, some antiquated ideas about the world that seem to express a denial of major, major problems we face as a world community, and kids are really not interested in fitting their thinking to the old system. Young people with high levels of creativity and interests are really turned off by information they're expected to learn and teaching methods are akin to dinosaurs for them. They seem to have a lot of brain activity that is not delegated properly to fit the schemas we currently navigate and we want them to fit the gestalt of what are, essentially, days gone by. Our culture, tradition, technologies and ideas from the past are failing them. The kids that seem to be affected the worst cannot conform on their own and are brought to the forefront as problematic.
So while I do think the meds do what they're designed to do, which is they are deployed to act on the brain, and alter the child so the child accomodates the system, the trouble with this is, the child then re-develops thought processes less spontaneous to fit the existing system. Meds are a way to mold the kids so they can accomplish what they'll need to to get through the day in our past, and still to a large extent, our current environment, which is a process oriented, steady paced, deliberating, in vivo world. Their behaviors are unacceptable in outdated systems, but we do little to update the systems. Particularly in America there seems to be considerable stagnation and an almost fearful attitude toward the explosion of innovation and advancements because of cultural manifestations of this burgeoning technology and information.
RSA animate lecture on Education Paradigms:
Ted talk on Education and creativity
To get a feel for what the realities for young people today, these videos were assigned to me in a cultural anthropology course:
We are the machine:
A Vision of Students Today
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